Google Photos for Android now offers easy archiving

Help eliminate the embarrassment of bad angles by archiving what you don't care for others to see.

Launching Google Photos can become a practice in vulnerability. The app tends to showcase the last batch of pictures you took, and if any are just plain bad or unflattering, it can leave you feeling exposed.

The latest update to Google Photos helps eliminate this kind of embarrassment. Discovered by 9to5Google, now you can archive photos from appearing on the main screen. Simply tap on the ability in the overflow menu, or select the ability from the navigation drawer. Archived photos will remain in your albums and search results, as well as on the Archive page — just as you would archive a batch of notes in Google Keep, for example.

Easily archive any or all selfies in Google Photos.

Granted, there are even more features coming to Google Photos in the near future — a majority of which were teased at Google I/O — but this will certainly help anyone looking to get their photo albums in order for when those machine learning tricks do make it to the photo-sharing suite. The feature is currently rolling out for Android; iOS users and web app users might have to hang tight for the moment.

I mean I don't really show my google photos app to anybody, I do share specific photos.. So I don't know where this is handy, I don't mind the clutter of photos. If I want to organize them I just put them in albums.

You kidding? Everyone I know uses photos, and has been wanting a way to clean up the clusterfu¢k mess of a camera roll. Seriously, who wants a continuous unorganized mess of thousands of pics, and to scroll through them looking for a particular one. Albums were a ok solution, they used to allow you to create folders to sort them, that showed at the top of the continuous mess... This is a reasonably good solution, add photos to a album, archive them, and the unorganized backup mess is easier to deal with... Anything that's not an album is easier to find. Not sure who wouldn't take advantage of this option.

The other thing, you say you organize with albums. In that mess, if you have thousands of pics, how do you remember which have been added to albums? How can you be sure you added all the related photos? A year from now will you remember which photos you have and haven't added from the mess? They aren't marked or labeled as added to albums in the main stream. The option to archive after adding to albums makes this all easier and less of a headache.

The ability to access your backed up photos/videos across all your devices/computers....

Chromecast enabled.

The auto sorting and grouping by location, and facial recognition.

The shared albums, people don't even need to have Google photos, and you can give people access to add their own images. Like a family, vacation, or wedding... Share an album with everyone involved, let them upload their photos to share with the group. Or share links, select multiple pics and quickly/easily share, it'll create a share link you can send to people, let's them view those selected photos, and you can go into the shared section and revoke access any time you want.

It's a pretty awesome app, tons of useful features. you should give it a try, much better/feature rich than LG's basic gallery app.

Also, a comparison between Google photos and a stock gallery app would be pointless. Search for Google photos articles here or Google...one is a feature rich app for photo backup, sharing, organizing, browsing, creating, editing etc...with really smart auto sorting and searching options. And the other just displays the pictures locally on your device, basic, no other features. It would be like saying I disabled Facebook, because I use this stock contacts app... What's the difference? Can someone compare them?

Awesome, finally! Not for hiding selfies, but organizing in general. But wish they'd make archiving an option from within the albums we created already. Kind of a pain to go back through more than 30k photos to archive the ones we've already organized into albums.

I want a way to lock my archive.
Many of us may let someone hold our phone to look at a photo that's not in an album and tell them, "now don't swipe!" Archive lets us move photos not for public consumption (get your mind out of the gutter, there are a lot of non-nude reasons to hide a photo).

I also want a way to optionally include them in searches instead of including them by default. I also want to secure them behind a lock.